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Until the late 20th century, the graphic-design area had been based on hand-craft processes: layouts being drawn by hand in order to actualise a design; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled into position on heavy paper or board for photo copying and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid advances in digital computer hardware and software utterly changed graphic design.

Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh computer, such as the MacPaint programme developed by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet enabled designers and artists to use computer graphics in a new, intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., allowed for pages of type and graphics to be placed into graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the transition of design from a drafting-table activity to an on-screen computer activity was basically complete.

Personal computers placed typesetting tools into the homes of designers, and so a time of experimentation began in the creation of new and unusual fonts and page layouts. Type and images were layered, fragmented, and dismembered; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and fonts were often changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this type of research took place in design education at art schools and universities. American designer David Carson, art director of Beach Culture magazine in 1989-91, Surfer in 1991-92, and Ray Gun magazine in 1992-96, caught the imagination of a youthful audience by taking such an experimental approach into graphic design.

Rapid growth in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend them; to layer type and graphics in space; and to link imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted with a photograph of New York’s Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Placed together, these images evoke a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.

The digital revolution in graphic design was shortly followed by general public access to the internet. A whole new sphere of graphic design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when internet business became a growth sector of the world-wide economy, causing organisations and businesses to scramble to establish web-sites. Designing a Web site involves the layout of screens of information rather than of physical pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a host of new considerations, including designing for navigation through the website and for using hypertext links to be taken to additional information. An example of strong Web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers created a strong visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this web-site included a consistent colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.

Because of the global effectiveness and reach of the internet, the graphic-design sector is becoming increasingly global in scope. In addition, the blending of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into Web-site design has caused the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expands from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.

In the 21st century, graphic design is far-reaching; it is a major component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates modern society, delivering information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The inexorable advance of technology has changed dramatically the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass market. However, the fundamental role of the graphic designer, adding creative form and clarity of content to communicate messages, remains the same.

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Law firm marketing is primarily based on promoting the lawyer as the product, so a biography is an essential component of promoting your services. This article offers five essential ideas to ensure you get your biography just right!

Creating a bio, for marketing lawyers on websites or in printed material is often given very little thought and invariably completed in a rush. Worse still is the bio that a lawyer hasn’t been involved in creating and another worker has scraped together from a resume.

If this rings a bell regarding your firm or biography then you have a serious flaw in your marketing strategy. You need to be aware that marketing of lawyers, particularly those in repeat business areas of law, is based around the principle that the lawyer is the product. That is why the staff page of a law firm website is generally the page most visited after the home or landing page. If you charge an hourly rate for your time, you are the ‘product’, and any prospective clients want to be aware of what they are buying!

It’s true that some companies base their marketing on a general sales pitch, or branding in a specific area of law, but generally, the success of your marketing strategy will be due to the client believing they will get good value when they buy the time of the lawyer doing their work. So, hopefully having impressed on you the importance of a strong bio, here are five ideas for putting one together:

Essential Ideas for writing a compelling Law Firm Biography

Provide all the important information
It’s surprising how many law firm web-sites have bios of their staff that neglect to include relevant information. And this doesn’t mean which law school you went to. Make sure you start the bio with a full name, your position within the company, the type of work you provide, and any other firm responsibilities. It’s important to remember that you’re not writing this for other lawyers to read.

As a lawyer I was very happy the day I was admitted to the Supreme Court in my state. But honestly, many clients don’t have any interest what this means. So remember to include information that may be of interest to your client, not just facts that will impress other lawyers. By all means mention qualifications, positions on legal committees and the like, but unless it’s something you believe your clients will understand and consider important, then leave it to the end of the bio. It may help to involve a third party. Have someone outside the legal industry read your biography and provide some feedback.

Your client is looking for a solution
As hard as it may be for your ego to accept, the client is not charmed in you as individual. They are looking for someone they think can best solve their problem or most successfully undertake their project. So give them information that will convince them you’re the perfect person for the job. In printed documents you should aim to include actual examples of how you’ve helped people, but online bios are often very short. So try to cover this one with phrases like, “More than 10 years experience in”, “Recognised within the X business community for assisting with”, “A certified specialist in the area of”, or “Successfully negotiated more than 200 rural property contracts”.

Connect with the real world, not just the legal world
If your company or practice provides services that are based in a particular city or region you can advance your marketing efforts by demonstrating a connection to that community. Being recognised as a “local” by potential clients by demonstrating a connection with the region’s major industry eg. ” from a family with a long involvement in the coal mining industry”, encourages an immediate connection with the reader.

Add a little personality
Don’t hesitate to inject some personality to your biography. And this doesn’t just have to be the usual “Married with 2.5 children”. By all means include personal information if it helps with point number 4 above, but more importantly, you ought to think about your ‘flavour’ and the type of “client experience” you provide. Are you a ” fiercely determined approach”, a “collaborative practitioner focussed on keeping costs down” or a “down to earth, with a knack for easing clients concerns”. Finding a genuine point of difference in how you practice shows that you are a real person with a real personality” and not the same as all those other lawyers out there busily marketing themselves.

John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law firm marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.

Whether an artwork reached completion by purposeful application or was executed directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which medium are laid on in a single application) was once largely decided by the ideals and established techniques of its cultural tradition. For instance, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a detailed linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Sung Chinese Zen practice of quick, calligraphic brush painting, following a restive period of spiritual self-preparation. More recently, the artist has decided the technique and working formula best suited to his aims and temperament. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat may be working in his studio on sketches, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was working to emulate the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

The kind of relationship established between artist and patron, the location and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium used could also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the business-like 17th-century tradition of painting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his client’s approval before creating a large-scale commission. Distinctive problems specific to mural painting, such as viewer eye level and the size, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preparatory drawings and sometimes by using wax figurines or scale representations of the interior. Scale working drawings are essential to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying mediums, such as buon’ fresco (see below Fresco) on wet plaster, and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are divided with a grid of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters prefer to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects). In Renaissance painters’ workshops, their assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s design and studies.

The inherent properties of a medium or the atmospheric conditions of its site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (in which after application, the paint is fixed by heat [see below Mediums], for example) both holds the intensity and variation of the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon’ frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be fixed only with water on many ancient Egyptian murals are conserved by the dry atmosphere and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dust and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish may darken and yellow over time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.” Once cherished, this amber-gravy film is now generally removed to reveal colours in their original intensity. Glass started to replace varnish toward the end of the 19th century, when artists wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. Air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of modern museums make varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the establishment of portable easel pictures, ornate frames not only provided some protection from theft and damage but were considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (made of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in exuberant swags of fruit and flowers certainly appear almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A bulky frame also provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was separated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s intention is for his forms to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed by him as if through a wall opening. In contemporary Minimalist paintings, no effects of spatial illusionism are wanted; and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to emphasise its flatness, these abstract, geometrical designs are often displayed without frames or are only edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

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For most people travelling overseas is a fantastic experience, a rite of passage or a well-deserved reward for hard work. Unfortunately there are instances in which holidays have not gone to plan and travellers are involved in accidents that result in injuries, hospitalisation or even death. Each year, Australian Consular Offices handle over 25,000 cases involving Australians in difficulty overseas including 1,200 hospitalisations, 900 deaths and 50 evacuations for medical purposes.

In these instances, where individuals have not protected themselves with travel insurance, such personal misfortunes are exacerbated by long-term financial burdens. Hospitalisation, medical evacuations and the return of a deceased’s remains to their home country can become very costly. Where travellers are not covered by insurance they are themselves liable for covering any incurred medical and associated expenses. In some cases, individuals and families have been forced to sell off assets including their homes, in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their loved ones.

Forms of travel insurance include coverage for trip cancellation/interruption, medical insurance, baggage loss/delay, flight delay/cancellation and travel document protection. Whether you vacation overseas often, sporadically or are planning a once-in-a-lifetime journey, travel insurance is imperative. The cost of travel insurance is dependent on the type of coverageneeded, the age of the policy holder, destination of travel, how long you intend to stay and any pre-existing medical conditions. It is important to obtain the best kind of travel insurance to suit your individual requirements and it is imperative that you fully divulge any factors that may influence your insurance otherwise you may be denied coverage in the event of illness or injury.

Like many insurance policies there are standard general exclusions on most types of travel insurance and these can include acts of civil unrest, self-inflicted injury, loss/theft of unattended baggage, loss/theft of cash and pre-existing medical conditions. Some insurance policies may even invalidated in which injuries are sustained due to being under the influence of drugs or alcohol or during “dangerous or extreme activity” such as surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, parachuting and underwater activities involving the use of artificial breathing apparatus so travellers should read the fine print of their policy to ensure that their insurance is beneficial for them.

The consequences of not taking out travel insurance far outweigh the costs associated in purchasing a policy. The public consensus is that is you can’t afford travel insurance then you shouldn’t travel. It is also imperative that you are insured for the entire time you will be travelling and not allow your cover to expire before your return home.

If you’re looking for affordable travel insurance for peace of mind on your next holiday, TravelOnline in partnership with QBE Insurance will keep you safe and sound. TravelOnline and QBE are Australian travel insurance specialists.

Currently, Yamaha Motorcycles is famous for building some of the most popular motorcycles around the world. However, little-known to the general public, Yamaha has been around for many years, not just as a motorcycle manufacturer, but in other industries as well. They did, however, excel in creating motorcycles, thus becoming well-known in that field.

Over the years, Yamaha has built many different types of motorcycles. Although they started out building air-cooled, 2-stroke, single cylinder motorbikes, they became well known for creating the DT-1, the first ever trail bike. The trail bike phenomena pushed Yamaha to create their own dirt bike, which then prospered positively.

The best thing about the motocross bikes that Yamaha builds is that you can be sure of quality in every single bike. They are lightweight, without compromising the essential strength and durability necessary. Their stock tires can often offer more grip than other market parts, something that is not available in most off-road bikes.

These bikes are great for off-road trails and adventures, and one short trial on an off-road track will immediately prove the endurance that you will surely depend on with this wonderful pastime.

Motocross is a serious extreme sport that you should consider thoroughly before beginning. Obviously, an activity that involves a person riding a two-wheeled contraption with an engine propelling it to various heightened speeds can be extremely dangerous. By purchasing a Yamaha motorcycle which you can rely on for safety and dependability, you also lower the danger levels a notch! Whether you want to ride on road or dirt, Yamaha motorcycles will provide what you need, when you need it. These are rugged bikes that can withstand years of use without any problems.

The traditions and pathos of a particular period in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideals and aspirations of ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were emulated in a large amount of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, dress design, and handicrafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the redundancy of hand-craftmanship and the absence of direct expression between the fine craftsman and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully successful, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been immeasurable, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were innovative painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists have since excelled in so wide a range of creativity, leading 20th-century painters expressed their thoughts in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy printed posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the theatre; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made movies. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for textiles, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not at some point work in and revitalize.

Painters have been stimulated by the imagery, techniques, and design of other visual arts. One of these earliest influences was possibly from theatre, where ancient Greeks are thought to have been the first to apply the illusions of optical perspective. The discovery or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in art-forms and techniques of other cultures has been a crucial stimulus to the development of more contemporary styles of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new inspirations and ideas. The invention of photography and film introduced the creative to new aspects of nature, while eventually inspiring others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, employed the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints so as to provide the feeling of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and forms in the painting.

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